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Thanks again for your very insightful follow-up, really appreciate the depth of your reflections.

You are absolutely right that none of the trends I mention in my blog guarantees disruption. My blog simply explores a potential scenario, not a certainty. And I fully agree that, taken individually, AI, CBDCs, Digital ID, DeFi, quantum threats, etc., are not (yet) strong enough to destabilize major incumbents.

Where I see a shift is in the combination of these forces. Historically, banking has been remarkably resilient, often more resilient than its critics expect. But the next phase of digitalization may finally challenge not the balance sheet strength of banks, but their role in the value chain.

Regarding your question: “Can you think of three use cases where genAI will spawn fintech competitors and cut deeper into banking?”

I think the most transformative one could be a true financial assistant, potentially embedded inside a BigTech super-app, not just answering questions, but acting on behalf of the customer. If AI becomes the interface, then banks risk losing the entire front layer where differentiation happens.

The implications of such an assistant, combined with ongoing trends like digitalization and flows becoming more real-time would be significant:

• The assistant would recommend products purely on customer value, not bank margin → This instantly erodes many cross-subsidized or cash-cow products.

• Optimal cash allocation becomes automated → Less idle money on current/savings accounts, fewer overdrafts, fewer high-margin short-term credit products.

• Payments become instant, cheap, and embedded everywhere → Meaningful pressure on interchange revenues and domestic payment monopolies.

• Insurance shifts to usage-based and continuous-risk pricing → Lower margins and reduced bundling advantages.

• A large part of today’s intermediaries, who act as friction points and protection layers, disappear as everything moves to real-time rails.
  → This removes barriers that currently shelter incumbents.

In such a world, banks could remain extremely important, but primarily as regulated balance-sheet factories operating behind the scenes. The competitive battlefield might shift from “Which bank has the best front-end?” to “Which AI intermediary controls customer attention and trust?”

And in that scenario, yes, the winners would probably be the largest incumbents (acting as this back-end factory) and the BigTech player(s) offering the AI assistant, while Tier-2 and Tier-3 banks could be hit hardest.

Thanks for the feedback.

When I said “why aren’t more governments worldwide doing this?”, I wasn’t referring to A2A RTP systems in general, those are indeed being rolled out and promoted by governments globally. I was specifically referring to cases where a government funds an A2A RTP system so that it becomes free for both users and merchants.

In the Eurozone, for example, we have SCT Inst, but when it’s used at merchants (with Wero being the upcoming example), merchants still pay a considerable fee.

Your point about rapid onboarding by banks is also valid. However, as always, banks tend to follow market demand. If a payment method is free for users and merchants and strongly promoted by the government, adoption by both groups would accelerate and banks, whether private or public, would be compelled to follow their customers’ expectations.

That’s why I still believe the “free” aspect could be the golden bullet. Once that’s in place, much of the rest follows naturally. Of course, this remains more of an opinion than a proven fact, as no other country has yet implemented such a model at scale (so the sample size of my opinion is not statisticallly relevant today :-)).

Thanks for the feedback. Indeed, you are absolutely right. As long as top management is not aware of certain necessary trade-offs, it will be impossible for analysts & architects to correctly do their job. But I hope my blog can bring maybe a little bit (not making too much illusions either :-)) of idea, that technology is always a matter of making trade-offs.

Thanks for sharing this blog. Very interesting.
Might be interesting to have a look at a blog I wrote about 4 years ago: https://www.finextra.com/blogposting/19211/from-app-to-super-app-to-personal-assistant, also about the super-apps.

If the payment amount is not matching in full with the invoice for a legitimate reason, it can still not be handled by the structured comment, but it should be possible for the matching to correctly handle this (and expect / anticipate this).
If invoice indicates that 80% should be paid on delivery and 20% on installation, it is possible to use 2 times the same structured comment, but obviously you will expect then 2 payments on different payment dates. 

Thanks for the feedback. 

The "checksum method" in Belgium unfortunately does not solve the issue that customers pay the incorrect amount. The structured comment put on a lot of wire transfers in Belgium is a 12 digit code, for which the checksum is just a modulo 97 of the first 10 digits. So checksum guarantees quite well that the right structured comment is entered, but it does not guarantee if right amount is used.
For this, many companies work with QR codes on their invoice (and in future SEPA Request-to-Pay could be used), but a lot of customers don't use this QR code, so issue with incorrect amounts remains indeed a big hassle for most companies.

Scott, thanks a lot for the feedback. Much appreciated. Indeed even though the list of examples I gave in the article is already quite long, this list is far from exhaustive. 
A few more examples are:

* Discrimination against certain minorities. Although laws exist to avoid this, we can not ignore there is an inherent (often unintentional) bias both in the automated risk algorithm and manual risk decision process. This means that certain minority groups are definitely "underbanked".
* For medical insurance, obviously people with a history of cancer is not the only example. Everyone with a history of medical expenses or pre-existing conditions might be impacted. In many countries medical insurances are even more expensive for women, due to the expected medical costs associated with child birth.
* Any form of non-traditional employment. In the blog I refer to freelancers and gig-workers, but obviously other non-traditional roles like e.g. artists, performers, or creatives are also impacted.
* People with disabilities might need specialized financial products and services that aren't widely available or are offered at higher costs.
* Language barriers for non-native speakers
* Temporary Residents and people doing remote work (due to complex tax regulations)
* ...

Clearly the list is enormous, leading to a considerable percentage of the population being underbanked in some form.

Sorry, I think there is a misunderstanding of what I meant here with term deposits. Indeed obviously if the bank invests my saving deposits in term deposits or any othe bonds this doesn't change anything to the liquidity of my saving deposits. 

What I mean here with term deposits, is that the customer invests directly his excess saving deposits in term deposits. This could be government bonds, but also term deposits offered by the bank. It's this last type I am referring to here. When term deposits are offered by the bank, the amount and duration can be very flexible, making it a good complement for saving deposits. The big difference with those term deposits (typically with maturity of 3, 5 or 10 years), is that the customer has to pay a penalty if he wants to liquidate them before maturity date. This makes the customer less inclined to quickly liquidate in case of a panic.

Many thanks for the interesting comments.
I fully agree that general regulation (applicable to all banks) will be most effective, otherwise commercial short-term gains will always attract certain banks to take more risk. These general regulations will however take time and after all lobbying will always be some kind of half-baked compromise. 

But I do also believe banks can also do a lot themselves. In above comment "Limiting deposits will reduce the size of bank balance sheet. Not sure how many bank shareholders will approve of that measure." I agree that banks will never limit deposits, but they can limit deposits on saving account, when they can ensure the money is put in term deposits at the bank or invested in securities. Often those products gain even more money to the bank than saving deposits and they don't bear this risk of immediate liquidation in case of panic.

Interesting views also on who is to blame for fake news put on social media. This is a very interesting discussion, but it's a discussion for lawyers and politicians. Once panic breaks out, all harm is already done and this harm can not easily be undone even when the perpetrator of the fake news is identified and it is confirmed that the news is fake. As a bank, you should therefore also take action to protect you against fake news, even if illegally spread. In this digital age, you won't have the time to go to court and obtain confirmation of the fact it was illegal fake news.